From "Moses and Akhenaten" By Ahmed Osman
Many websites claim that there is a contradiction between the Quran and Egyptology concerning the person who adopted Moses. The Quran says that it was Pharaoh's queen while the books of Egyptology, based on the Old Testament, mention the Pharaoh's daughter. I believe the following lines can help solve the riddle.
A Philological Explanation
The word for 'daughter' and the word for 'house' were written identically
b_t in early Hebrew and open to misconstruction by anyone not familiar with the Egyptian usage. To an Egyptian the word 'house' was also used -and indeed, still is- to signify a wife: to a Hebrew it meant either 'house' in the sense of a building or 'household'. Later, both Hebrew and the language of Ancient Egypt, which had no written vowels, began to use some consonants like
y to indicate long vowels. Thus,for example, we find a slightly different spelling for
b_t Phar'a in the Book of Genesis account of events when Jacob, the father of Joseph, died. Joseph, who wanted permission to take him back to Canaan for burial, did not speak to the king directly but to the
b_y_t Phar'a , the Hebrew word signifying 'the house of Pharaoh':
'And when the days of his mourning were past, Joseph spake unto the house of Pharaoh, saying, if now I have found grace in your eyes, speak I pray you, in the ears of Pharaoh...' (Genesis 50:4). 'Pharaoh' itself means 'the great house'. Thus
b_y_t Phar'a signifies the 'house of the great house', which in the Egyptian sense would mean the queen whose intercession he sought in the matter of his father's burial.
There is an example of similar usage earlier in the Book of Genesis when the brothers who had earlier sold Joseph into slavery made their second trip to Egypt at a time of famine. On this occasion Joseph revealed his true identity and was so moved that he
'wept aloud: and the Egyptians and the house of Pharaoh heard' (Genesis 45:2). This had been construed as meaning that Joseph's weeping was so loud that it was audible in the royal palace, but I interpret it as meaning that the queen heard the news of his brother's arrival.
In this second example the word used is again
b_y_t Phar'a. However, in the Book of Exodus, where we have the story of the Pharaoh's daughter going down to bathe, finding the Hebrew child in the rushes and later adopting him, the y is absent and we have simply
b_t Phar'a. My suspicion was that during the ninth century BC, the early stages of written Hebrew when the Old Testament was given permanent form, all three words had been written in this way, referring in each instance to the 'house of Pharaoh', the reigning queen and the
y in the two Genesis references had been added late, as written Hebrew developed, because the scribe did not understand the special Egyptian usage of the word 'house'. This, while not easy to establish, proved to be the case.
The Hebrew Masoretic text we have now goes back only to around the tenth century AD and could not throw any light on the matter. Nor could sections of the Old Testament found in the caves of Qumran, near the Dead Sea, some of which belong to the second century BC. Confirmation was eventually provided by the Moabite Stone. This black basalt inscribed stone was left by Mesha, King of Moab, at Dhiban (biblical Dibon, to the east of the Dead Sea) to commemorate his revolt against Israel and his subsequent rebuilding of many towns ( II Kings, 3:4-5). This stone was found by the Revd F.Klein, a German missionary working with the Church Missionary Society, on 19 August 1868 and is now in the Louvre in Paris. The inscription refers to the triumph of ' Mesha, ben Chemosh, King Of Moab', whose father reigned over Moab for thirty years. he tells how he (Mesha) threw off the yoke of Israel and honoured his god, Chemosh.
The Moabite Stone
According to the American archaeologist James B.Pritchard, a professor at t6he University of Pennsylvania; ' The date of the Mesha Stone is fixed roughly by the reference to Mesha, King of Moab, in II Kings 3:4-5, after 849 BC. However, since the contents of the stela point to a date toward the end of the king's reign, it seems probable that it should be placed between 840 and 820, perhaps about 830 BC in round numbers'. The text reads:
'I [am] Mesha, son of Chemosh...King of Moab... I said to all the people:" Let each of you make a cistern for himself in his house."'
The inscription, written in the Semitic language used for writing at the time by the Jews of Israel, confirms that the word for house was then written simply
b_t, without the the insertion of
y and was the same word as daughter. This is also true of the way it was written in the Phoenician language.
When 'house' and 'daughter' were written identically there was no cause to differentiate between them. The situation changed when development of the Hebrew language made it possible to alter the spelling slightly to give two different words. The scribes then found themselves in a dilemma, based on the ignorance of the fact that 'house' had the Egyptian meaning 'wife'. It now becomes clear what has happened. If the word simply meant 'house' or 'household', it made sense that Joseph approached the house of Pharaoh on the subject of his father's funeral and that his weeping could be heard in the king's house, but it made no sense at all to suggest that the whole of the king;s household had come
'down to wash herself at the river' (Exodus, 2:5) or had become the mother to the child. The scribe therefore decided in the Exodus reference to retain the alternative meaning of 'daughter' whereas it, too, should have been changed to 'house', signifying the wife of Pharaoh, his queen.
Oh, and by the way, it almost impossible that the 'Egyptian' queen would give her adopted son, a name derived from a Hebrew root, even if she had been sure that he is a Hebrew child.( drawn out of water means moshe i.e mose in Hebrew). "Mose" in ancient Egyptian language means "son" and the name formula god+mose was common e.g
Amen mose = Amen + Mose= son of Amun
Thut mose = Thut + Mose = son of Thut
Ramose= Ra + Mose =son of Re
They did not give a "real name" for the child whom they drew out of the water, they just called him 'the son" i.e "Mose".
